2024 warmest year on record
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
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I'm Janet Jalil and at 14 Hours GMT on Friday the 10th of January, these are our main stories. 2024 is deemed to be the world's hottest year on record by scientists, with temperatures rising above an internationally recognised climate target for the first time. This comes as firefighters continue to battle wildfires in Los Angeles, where at least 10 deaths have been confirmed. Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro prepares to be sworn in for a third term despite a global outcry over alleged vote rigging in last year's elections.
Also in this podcast is time running out for TikTok in the US and... They basically told me that anything that goes into the household scrap bin is compressed and buried. I just wish I could go back in time.
A man who lost Bitcoin worth as much as a billion dollars also loses his legal case to search the dump where it's thought to be buried. For the past few days, the world has witnessed apocalyptic images of fires sweeping through Los Angeles. Now, even as the fires continue to rage, it's been confirmed that last year was the hottest on record. Not only that, the EU's climate monitoring service Copernicus says 2024 was also the first calendar year to exceed the key global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. The director of Copernicus, Carlo Buontempo, said the cause for the increase was the greenhouse gases we continue to pump into the atmosphere.
The many record-breaking events we have seen over the course of the last 12 months are not statistical oddities, but rather a direct consequence of the generalised warming of our climate system, which is mostly fuelled by the steady increase in atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.
Hena Handel is National Coordinator of Climate Live USA and a four-time delegate of the UN's Climate Change Conference.
We had the hottest summer on record. We had the hottest day on record. So it's not too far of a stretch to imagine that we'd have the hottest year on record. But I don't think that expectation diminishes how concerning this really is. And now the fact that 2024 is the hottest year on record is really concerning that we're going to breach that mark in sort of a long-term way. And the impacts that we were warning about, those irreversible impacts, if we breach that threshold, might be in our near future.
I got more details from our climate editor, Justin Rowlatt.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service says last year was 1.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Now, that makes it the first calendar year to exceed that symbolic boundary of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. That was the boundary, the target, if you like, set that the world agreed to try and stick to, recognising the science from the UN's climate science body that said there'd be significantly worse impacts from climate change, from global warming, above 1.5. Now, we haven't technically broken the target because that's a long term, a 20-year average. What it is telling us, though, is just how close the world is coming to doing that in the longer term. So really worrying data.
So even though we haven't yet technically breached that threshold that was agreed in Paris, the fact that the last 10 years have been the warmest ever, that ocean temperatures are now at record highs. This all seems to indicate that we're really on a very destructive path and it doesn't seem the world is doing enough to combat climate change.
No, the world certainly isn't. And what was particularly worrying is that climate scientists weren't expecting last year, 2024, or 2020-23 to be as hot as they were. And they're not entirely sure why. One reason may be clouds. There's some evidence that low-level clouds, the clouds that reflect the radiation back from the sun...
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Speakers
18 identified
Janet Jalil 8 min
Justin Rowlatt 3 min
Ione Wells 3 min
Ziad Baroud 2 min
Peter Bowes 2 min
Stephanie Prentice 2 min
John Morgan 1 min
Lily Jamali 1 min
Ian Williams 1 min
Paul Moss 1 min
Garrett Gray 1 min
Oliver Conway 1 min
James Menendez 1 min
Tavia Weinman 1 min
Hena Handel
Manolo de los Santos
Pete Mitchell
Edmundo Gonzalez
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